Iran is at the centre of a global storm: targeted by new sanctions,
suspected by Washington, defended by Brazil and Turkey. But the complex
diplomacy around its nuclear programme could be ended by decisions made
not in the United States but in Israel.

About the author

Paul Rogers is professor of peace studies at Bradford
University and is openDemocracys international-security editor.

Iran has returned to the centre
of international diplomacy, and with a vengeance. A week after the
crisis over Israels assault
on an aid-flotilla bound for Gaza, the United Nations Security Council
on 9 June 2010 adopted
a resolution imposing another tranche of sanctions on the Tehran regime
over its contested nuclear programme. The response - from Irans
ambassador at the UN to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at home - was
characteristically vigorous. In the anniversary week of Ahmadinejads
victory in Irans disputed
presidential election on 12 June 2010, Irans leadership is as
determined as ever to withstand what it sees as unjust interference in
its internal affairs.

But this is more than just another episode
in an endless cycle of confrontation between Iran and the west in
general and the United States in particular. The Tehran-Washington
polarisation remains one of the principal faultlines of global politics,
but two additional elements in the current situation make it both more
complex and more perilous than ever:

* the deep
concern in Israel about Irans nuclear plans, and its influence over the
Hizbollah movement in Lebanon (see Robert G Rabil, Hizbollah
vs Israel: the coming clash, 9 March 2010).

A
cascade of pressure

The Security Council Resolution
1929, which imposes new restrictions on trade with Iran, was
welcomed by Washington as a signal of the international-communitys
determination to take a tough line with Tehran. The reality is more
prosaic: after a lengthy process of negotiation among the councils
permanent members, the content of the resolution was gutted in order to
accommodate the concerns of Russia and China before they could vote for
it.

Even then, it was opposed by two key non-permanent members of
the council with influence in their region and in the majority-world,
Turkey and Brazil (see Leslie Bethell, Brazil:
regional power, global power, 8 June 2010). The leaders of these
two states, prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and President Lula, had
agreed a uranium-exchange deal
in Tehran on 17 May 2010 in an attempt to defuse the crisis; this
reflects both their ambition
to play a more prominent role in the multipolar world and, more
immediately, their deep concern about the possibility of an escalation
of the crisis over Iran.

Turkeys active and confident regional
diplomacy, not least the critical stance its government has adopted
towards Israel (before
and after the assault on the Mavi Marmara, in which nine of
its citizens were killed), has given the country a new profile across
the middle east (see Israel-Turkey-United
States: Gazas global moment, 3 June 2010). The challenge to
leading Arab states that pursue a more conservative path, Hosni
Mubaraks Egypt in particular, is evident (see Sami Moubayed, Turkey's
Erdogan: Never a 'yes' man, Asia Times, 10 June 2010).

The sanctions issue is only one aspect of these evolving regional
dynamics. In themselves, the new measures will have little impact on a
near-moribund Iranian economy; and far from posing a threat to Mahmoud
Ahmadinejads position, they may even (as the Iranian analyst Ali Ansari suggests)
prove counterproductive by fuelling his regimes defiance of perceived
western bullying. A year after the eruption of street-protests following
Ahmadinejads contested election victory, a state that continues to
work hard to suppress internal dissent can find a ready domestic
audience by portraying the latest sanctions as part of an imperial
agenda.

But three aspects of the sanctions package and their
diplomatic context do have implications for Iran. The first is that
Russia is now unlikely to supply Iran with the S-300
anti-aircraft/anti-missile system, as had earlier been agreed (see "Russia
to freeze missile sale to Iran, Putin tells Sarkozy", Ha'aretz,
11 June 2010). The largely obsolete Iranian air-defence system would
have gained great military benefits from acquiring the long-range S-300
system; the end of the deal will be a significant loss for Tehran.

The
second is that Tehran may (according to official Iranian media sources)
now reviseIAEA).
The strong indication here is that Irans government will limit the IAEAs
access to Iran's nuclear-energy facilities. The cold rationale of
this position is: if the UN Security Council is determined to sanction
Iran more, even at a time when the Brazil-Turkey-Iran deal was on offer
(and even encouraged at one stage by the United States), why should Iran
work with the United Nations?
its relationship with the International Atomic Energy Agency (

The third aspect is that the
Barack Obama administration (according to a report from Washington) is
preparing to shift the position on Iran's nuclear ambitions that was
elaborated in the national-intelligence estimate (NIE) published during
George W Bushs presidency in December 2007 (see David E Singer, "U.S.
presses its case against Iran ahead of sanctions vote, New
York Times, 8 June 2010).

That NIE assessment - Iran:
Nuclear Intentions and Capabilities - reached the conclusionprogramme
was indeed developing rapidly, but that specific work on
weapons-systems had largely ceased in 2003 (see Jan De Pauw, Iran,
the United States and Europe: the nuclear complex, 5 December
2007). The briefings now underway suggest that the the forthcoming NIE,
while not directly contradicting the 2007 report, will find that Iran is
(possibly under the aegis of the Revolutionary Guards [IRGC])
conducting applied-research programmes on matters such as the
construction of nuclear-triggers.
(surprising to many, given Washingtons confrontational public stance
towards Iran at the time) that Irans civil-nuclear-power

The combination of these three
factors amounts to a tightening of pressure on Iran. At the same time,
they do not portend any real prospect of United States military action
against Iran. Barack Obamas outreach to Iran during his first year in
office, symbolised by his nowrooz (new-year) greeting in March
2009, may have delivered little; but his administration still maintains
that it would prefer dialogue with Tehran leading to a negotiated
solution.

But what applies to the United States most definitely
does not apply to Israel.

A view to the north

Israels plans and intentions towards Iran are a vital if uncertain
component of the regional strategic landscape (see Israels
shadow over Iran, 14 January 2010). It cannot be said with any
certainty that Israel is moving towards an early assault on Irans
nuclear- and missile-complexes. What can be said the view held by the
current Israeli government of Binyamin
Netanyahu - and shared to a great extent across the Israeli
political spectrum - is that Irans acquisition of nuclear weapons would
represent an existential threat to Israel that must be prevented at all
costs.

Binyamin Netanyahu outlined the three greatest strategic
challenges to Israel in an important speech at the SabinForuminNovember 2008. In his view these
are: Irans nuclear ambitions; missiles from Iran, Hamas (in Gaza) and
Hizbollah (in Lebanon); and a pervasive international denial of Israel's
right to self-defence.

The attack on the Mavi Marmara
on 31 May 2010 is part of the response
to the last of these threats (see Thomas Keenan & Eyal Weizman, Israel:
the third strategic threat, 7 June 2010). The crisis over this
event has received huge media attention, which to an extent has
overshadowed an even more significant development in recent days: news
in Israel both of the deployment of Scud missiles in Lebanon
and of detailed Israeli military plans for a massive assault against
Hizbollah.

The well-informed and reliable Defense News
reports that the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) have, since the failed war
of July-August 2006, fundamentally rethought its strategy and tactics.
The IDF is now ready for an even more intense - and, it is hoped,
decisive - war with Hizbollah
(see Barbara Opall-Rome, Israel's New Hard
Line on Hizbollah, Defense News, 31 May 2010).

At
present, it seems that the planning for such a war does not envisage
that it would be launched out of the blue but rather that it might
arise from a provocation, a crisis with Iran - or sheer military
miscalculation. This known unknown notwithstanding, the details of the
proposed operation are worth quoting at length:

 a new fight
against Iranian- and Syrian-backed Hizbollah would see an all-out
assault on the party's arsenals, command centres, commercial assets and
strongholds throughout the country. But it would also include attacks on
national infrastructure; a total maritime blockade; and interdiction
strikes on bridges, highways and other smuggling routes along the
Lebanese border with Syria. Meanwhile land forces would extend a
ferocious land grab well beyond the Litani River that Israeli brigades
belatedly hobbled towards but failed to reach in the last war. Finally,
Israel would consider the kind of targeted killings that it now executes
only in the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip.

The Hizbollah movement
which fought Israel to a standstill in the 2006 war - thus claiming victory
in the aftermath - is now a senior partner in the Beirut government
headed by Saad Hariri; a third of Hariri's cabinet are Hizbollah
representatives (see Zaid Al-Ali, Lebanon:
chronicles of an attempted suicide, 20 May 2009). IDF planners
view this domestic political compromise, the outcome of an extended and
bitter post-war standoff,
in terms of the Lebanese governments failure to control Hizbollah.
They draw the conclusion that Lebanons national assets - including even
the Lebanese army - are now legitimate targets.

Israeli claims
that Hizbollah has now added Scud missiles to its already extensive
arsenal - and may even intend to deploy them in northern Lebanon where
they are difficult to counter - may or may not be correct. But there is
evidence that Hizbollah has greatly increased its arsenal of
shorter-range weapons; and its Iranian ally has steadily developed
versatile solid-fuel medium-range ballistic-missiles that could reach
deep into Israel and leave no part of the country immune (see Amal
Saad-Ghorayeb, The
Hizbollah project: last war, next war, 13 August 2009).

A
last throw

The Israeli plans for a definitive war in
Lebanon are part of a core military outlook that sees the demonstration
of overwhelming military power against intransigent opponents who are
resolutely against peace as the only route to security. Before and after
such armed confrontations, strong deterrence is needed (see Avi Shlaim,
Israel
at 60: the iron wall revisited, 8 May 2008).

An interview
in Defense News with Israel's deputy chief-of-staff, Major-General
Benjamin Gantz, offers an unusually revealing insight into this
mindset. The journal paraphrases his warning that it could take
repeated rounds of high-intensity wars to remove the Iranian-trained and
financed threat from the north. The aim, he said, is to prolong the
periods of relative quiet between war fighting.

Israel cannot exist with protracted peaks of warfare.
Therefore we have to reduce them to reasonable levels - similar to the
way we drove down terror in the aftermath of Defensive Shield [the IDF's
operation in the West Bank in 2002]. That way we allow our people to
live reasonably under a protracted emergency situation until we fix it,
and then we go back to square one.

I doubt there will be peace
afterwards, but at least we'll be able to extend the time between peaks
Through strategic attrition - one round then another round - we'll
create a situation where each new round brings worse results than the
last. And that, in and of itself, brings a formidable deterrent.

Israel's
deputy
chief-of-staff here exposes Israel's security predicament (see Hizbollahs
warning flight, 4 May 2005). Israel is essentially impervious to
any serious military attack by land or sea; but the modern experience of
rocket-assault - the Scud-attacks launched by Saddam
Husseins Iraq in 1991, the hundreds of rockets fired by Hizbollah
in 2006, and even the crude devices launched from Gaza since the
withdrawal of Israeli forces in 2005 - means that Israel is now living
with a form of insecurity as (or even more) serious as anything since
the Yom Kippur/Ramadan war of October 1973.

The Binyamin
Netanyahu government and much of Israels military establishment think
that peace is not now possible; Israel can only be secure by being a
fortress that periodically strikes out at its enemies to massive effect.
There are many dangers in this view (see After Gaza:
Israels last chance, 17 January 2009). But its logic is also
clear: that there is a real risk of another war before too long - and
that this will be a double war, against both Iran and Hizbollah.